Two of the Net's most trusted hoax-busters are Barbara Mikkelson, 42, and David Mikkelson, 41, who run snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Pages. Part research librarians, part gumshoes, the couple have turned their shared hobby into a public service, verifying or debunking stories that sound too good to be true.

Barbara and David met on the Net in a Usenet discussion group about urban legends, and have been publishing their truth-serum site for six years. After Sept. 11 they saw their traffic increase tenfold, as fears and theories about terrorism and war exploded exponentially.

[…] It was a brilliant Sunday, warm and sunny. We all went back to the old neighborhood to carve pumpkins, sitting in the middle of the blocked-off street scooping gourd guts and plunging knives into the visages of helpless plant life. Gnat wandered around in her costume: a unicorn suit I bought her at Baby Gap. Little gold hooves, a gold horn, ears, and a fluffy tail. It would make Hitler say awwww. When I put it on her and let her walk around the house, she scared the bejaysus out of Jasper: he sniffed, looked at me, sniffed again, barked once, and backed away. It was almost as if his long dormant suspicion had come true: I knew it! I knew you weren't one of them, you're one of us, you usurper! Pretender!

Little unnerves a dog like a tail with no aroma beneath. […]

O: Did you have any involvement in making the film?

AM: No, deliberately. I think at an early stage, I was asked if I did want any involvement, but whenever there's been films proposed of any of my books, my answer has been pretty much the same. If someone's going to butcher my baby, I'd just rather it wasn't me. And also, I don't really have any great interest in writing for movies. Comics, to me, is a much more promising field. There's still a lot of ground to be broken in comics, whereas movies, to a degree… I don't know. They're a wonderful art form, but they're not my favorite art form. They might not even be in the top five of my favorite art forms. So my energies, I think, are best put into a medium I understand and enjoy and have enthusiasm for. On that basis alone, I'm not intending to write any films. But if it's an adaptation of one of my own works, then it would be too painful to… You're talking to a writer who doesn't even revise. Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window. It's got to be pretty much right the first time. So to me, rewriting is a harrowing process. I just don't do it. On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.

Top 10 Gaining Queries
Week Ending Oct. 23, 2001

1. AC-130
2. moorhuhn3
3. smallpox
4. halloween costume ideas
5. zorro
6. pumpkin carving
7. cipro
8. xbox
9. jack the ripper
10. smallville

Top 10 Declining Queries
Week Ending Oct.23, 2001

1. bert is evil
2. GBU-28
3. london underground
4. nokia 5510
5. nobel prize
6. tony kern
7. diego garcia
8. rose mcgowan
9. kursk
10. mike tyson

''Ladies and gentlemen, our president said Islam is a peaceful religion, [but] I beg to differ with our distinguished leader,'' Robertson said Monday on his show. ''That just isn't the case.'' […]

After Monday's segment of ''The Jihad Trail,'' Robertson offered an on-air commentary, saying there may be 100 million to 150 million Muslims who are fundamentalists, who ''take the words of Mohammed that are in the Koran that basically say kill Jews and Christians and launch a jihad against those who don't believe in Allah and submit to Islam.''

Robertson contrasted fundamentalists with moderates, who, he said, are ''willing to live in harmony with Jews and Christians,'' and with a group he called secularists, who, he said, ''know a little of the Koran, a few verses maybe, and it's kind of a nice lifestyle. They're making plenty of money, so they're having a good time, and I guess there's some provisions in there (that) they can divorce their wife and have multiple wives and so forth and so on, so that's not a bad deal for them, but they don't understand the tenets.''

In the many articles I've read about the possible remedies for a biological weapons attack, the mantra has been that people can't respond or protect themselves effectively on an individual basis-- it has to be done on the level of the public health system. What exactly does that mean?

Let's back up a second and ask, what are we doing? Our government is buying ciprofloxacin, and we're buying tons of it. We're buying so much cipro that Bayer in Germany has to reopen a long-shutdown factory to accommodate the American demand. That seems to be the primary thrust of this administration's commitment at this point.

In my book, purchasing massive quantities of ciprofloxacin is a medical response, not a public health response. The appropriate public health response, it seems to me, would be to look for the most frontline primary antibiotic that appears to be effective. As far as we can tell, the stuff that's floating around right now in people's envelopes is completely penicillin-susceptible. It would make a whole lot more sense and it would save hundreds of millions of dollars -- not to mention you wouldn't be breeding broad-spectrum, drug-resistant bacterial disease in millions of Americans -- if you use penicillin. Why in the world are we going for the world's most expensive, broad-spectrum, highly resistance-prone antibiotics?

So, another actor writes a book about their glamorous, whirlwind life. Personally, as an ex-Detroiter, that crap bores me to tears. I've always been more interested in the working stiffs of Hollywood, 99% of whom are overlooked in those phony, "tell-all" books. For every Bruce Willis and Steven Spielberg, there are a hundred no-name slobs scraping out a living in this shockingly difficult profession.

Therefore, this is not a memoir about what I said to so-and-so at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It's also not about an actor's "meteoric" rise, or "tragic" fall. Rather, this book is dedicated to the players on the second string, the "B" people, if you will, and I cheerfully include myself in that lot."

[…] Do the global terror links reach even as far as Sesame Street? Is Bert the Muppet a henchman of terrorist mastermind Usama bin Laden?

The answer is clearly no, but puzzled newspaper readers are still wondering how the Sesame Street icon ended up in a news service photograph of a pro-bin Laden protest in Bangladesh. The pictures clearly showed demonstrators holding up a large poster in which bin Laden and Bert are standing next to each other. […]

[…] Shout-outs and mad love to my peeps at the Apple Store! Y'all got the teknical flava an' the aqua bling goin' on! Today I returned to the Maluvamerica to get the keyboard replaced-- the delete key had popped off when I was installing the Airport card, and given how fast I type, I need a sturdy, dependable delete key. One that can stand up to constant use. On my previous visit I'd been told that they don't have extra keys waiting to be doled out. I'd also been told that since I'd cracked the case to install the card, I'd voided the warranty. You can void a warranty on these machines by frowning at them, it appears. Well, given that I'd had the machine one fargin' day, I intended to get Customer Satisfaction. […]

"We live in a land governed by plurality of opinion in an open electorate, but we are now under siege by adherents of a fundamentalist, totalitarian belief system that tolerates no dissent," Attorney General John Ashcroft said. "Our most basic American values are threatened by an enemy opposed to everything for which our flag stands. That is why I call upon all Americans to submit to wiretaps, e-mail monitoring, and racial profiling. Now is not the time to allow simplistic, romantic notions of 'civil liberties' and 'equal protection under the law' to get in the way of our battle with the enemies of freedom."

In the past, Ashcroft said, efforts by federal agencies to restrict personal freedoms were "severely hampered" by such factors as the judicial system, the Bill Of Rights, and "government by the people." Since the attacks, however, some such limitations have been waived, finally giving the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and White House the greater powers they need to defend freedom.

"Normal" will be constantly redefined for a while. Example: At City Center in downtown Minneapolis last week, a man approached a security guard and told him there was an unattended suitcase in the atrium. Before Sept. 11, the guard might have moseyed on over. Not today. I saw the suitcase -- a simple camel-colored Samsonite by the benches in front of the bookstore. I kept walking, thinking: Well, City Center, there's a highly symbolic name for the evening news; good fear quotient. If it's a nail bomb, I'll probably be safe once I turn this corner. If it's high explosives, will the atrium channel the explosion and make it more powerful? If the suitcase contains some sort of aerosolized germ, well, the technical term for all of us now is hosed. Let us conjugate: I am hosed. You are hosed. He and she are hosed. We are hosed. From the Latin "hosum," to be truly and thoroughly scre --

Name three songs that make up a perfect stripper's set.

First, I just want to say that if I see one more girl come out in a plaid schoolgirl skirt and a white blouse tied at the waist, dancing to "Rag Doll" by Aerosmith, I'm gonna scream.

Second of all, I think there should be a nationwide moratorium on "Cherry Pie" by Warrant. That song doesn't exist anywhere but strip clubs and you just think, OK, I wasn't having such a good time in the late '80s, early '90s to begin with and this kind of music is part of the reason why. My irony meter is not yet pegged to accept "Cherry Pie."

Historically, when all else fails, pull out "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC. And "Bad to the Bone" -- guys really adore that. If the club is more hip-hop friendly, it's such a savage song, but "Can I Get a Fuck You" by Jay Z… it creates such a tension. It's a nice girl doing this naughty thing to a really tough song: "OK, I need to get to know that girl better."

But the no-fail, can't-miss song of all time seems to be "Pour Some Sugar on Me" by Def Leppard. I'm not sure if this is due to the celebratory, unabashed corniness of the song or if there's a direct link between glucose and the male libido, but there you have it.

MEDICINE
Peter Barss of McGill University, for his impactful medical report "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts."
PUBLISHED IN: The Journal of Trauma, vol. 21, no. 11, 1984, pp. 990-1.

TECHNOLOGY
Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012.

If airtight underwear someday makes its way onto the shelves of America's department stores, thank Buck Weimer.

Seven years ago, Weimer, a Pueblo, Colo., therapist, came up with the idea of ''Under-Ease'' skivvies, complete with a flatulence filter.

Weimer, 62, and a dozen other researchers, inventors and scientists received the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize on Thursday night for their unique, occasionally head-scratching, and often bizarre contributions to the world.

The awards, bestowed each year by actual Nobel Prize winners, are granted for work that ''cannot or should not be reproduced.''

Weimer, no stranger to humorous pokes at his product with the motto: ''Wear them for the ones you love'', stresses that Under-Ease is a serious medical product.

''While we appreciate the humor and get a lot of that we recognize that it's a medical product, and it's for people in need,'' he said. ''We believe we're certainly fulfilling a service here.'' […]

[…] According to Iris Huffman, emergency-services director at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the key to enjoying vapidity again is to extract oneself from the hard realities of the world very slowly.

"The instinct is to immediately throw yourself back into your regular daily routine, but this isn't always best," Huffman said. "Allow yourself time for a gradual return to the petty, shallow, meaningless little life you led before this horrible tragedy. I'm telling my patients: Don't go see Zoolander until you know you're actually ready." […]

catachresis \kat-uh-KREE-suss\ (noun):
*1 : use of the wrong word for the context
2 : use of a forced and especially paradoxical figure of speech

The newspaper's sharp-eyed copy editor was adept at spotting any catachresis that might find its way into a reporter's story.

As you might have guessed, "catachresis" is a word favored by grammarians. It can sometimes be used merely as a fancy label of disparagement for uses the grammarian finds unacceptable -- as when Henry Fowler insisted in 1926 that "mutual" in "our mutual friend" was a catachresis. (Fowler preferred "common," but "mutual" does have an established sense which is correct in that context.) The first recorded use of "catachresis" dates to 1553, and it has been used to describe (or decry) misuses of a word ever since. "Catachresis" comes to us by way of Latin from the Greek word "katachresis," which means "misuse." A word whose meaning is very close to that of "catachresis" is "malapropism," which usually refers to an unintentionally humorous misuse of a word.

People who take a garlic supplement each day are far less likely to fall victim to the common cold than those who do not, research suggests.

Although garlic has been traditionally used to fight off and treat the symptoms of the common cold, this is the first hard evidence of its medicinal properties.

Secret Puzzle

This unlink-the-metal-pieces game promises "Hours of Fun." This is such a lie that I am concerned that the package designer's pants may be on fire even now. A linked-metal puzzle cannot provide hours of fun. It can provide minutes of fun or hours of frustration. This provided about a minute and a half of vague distraction. I am not trying to play up my own prowess when I tell you that I've had fast food orders that took longer to sort out than this puzzle. If you find this game fascinating, I know a great game you can play that requires nothing more than both hands and a flashlight.  D

Peter David, Harlan Ellison, and Neil Gaiman are a trio of hugely popular authors whose most-recognized works include the Sandman comics, Babylon 5, best-selling Star Trek novel Imzadi, and the original script for the legendary Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever". Although much of their work has fallen within the science fiction genre, the three men have worked in every conceivable medium: television, film, fiction and non-fiction books, short stories, essays and comic books-- and have acquired followings in all of them. Hence, this event will be a panel discussion on the creative process of fictional works in many fields.

"It's not just another happy elf preserve, nor yet another post-apocalyptic cybermonkey romp. It's something you've never seen before, something you couldn't have seen before. There hasn't been one of these, … yet." The persistent online world genre is still relatively new, a fact that means there's still a great deal of room for thematic freedom. Nonetheless, the majority of the projects know to us fall somewhere within the broad sphere of fantasy. Accordingly, it's always interesting to discover a new game in development that promises to step into different territory, and even more so when the team crafting it includes considerable experience in both electronic and pen and paper game development.